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"Can you look at me for a moment?" Tubbo asks.
Ranboo - whatever's left of him - tilts his chin upwards, and his empty eyes point in his direction, gazing aimlessly. "What's up?" says the ghost, uncharacteristically casual, painfully casual. "Hey, are you ok? You look a little pale."
Tubbo is not ok. How could Tubbo be ok? He is pacing the length of the room, trembling, trying to keep his cool. Trying to breathe. Tubbo always has to keep calm for Ranboo.
"You're dead," he says, testing the words on his tongue, and immediately hot bile begins to rise in his throat. Heat stings the back of his eyes. "How can you be dead?"
The spirit blinks curiously. He reminds Tubbo of Ghostbur, in the stupidest way possible - vaguely childish, swinging his legs from the wicker chair he's sat upon, vacant, like he's not fully there. "Sam killed me," he replies simply. "Because I escaped the prison and I wasn't supposed to."
Tubbo lets out a noise and clutches his head. Why isn't he panicking more? "Sam, Sam," he mumbles to himself, spinning on the spot, spiraling. Tommy's face flashes into his mind. He let me die, Tubbo, he didn't even come get my body. Sam, his old friend, who he'd built the Guardian farm in the middle of the ocean with. That is something to think about later.
Something comes flush with his body, something cold, and Tubbo gasps - but it is Ranboo, standing tall above him, clutching at his sleeves with an icy chill. He is barely solid, half corporeal and transparent to the fire that is lit in the living room of their Snowchester home. The Enderman flickers with light. "Tubbo, it's ok," he says softly. Voice light and without the shrill pitch of anxiety that usually accompanies his husband's tone in situations like this one. "Death - isn't as bad as it's made out to be. There's no pain, no suffering, and I'm less annoying too - I haven't felt the urge to cry or make a speech once!" He laughs at this, a full, hearty Ranboo-like laugh. "Isn't that great? Aren't I better? I've never felt this great, never felt so alive!"
Tubbo blinks hard, catches his breath, no pain, no suffering, tries to remember, I've never felt this great, never felt so alive. He can't believe he wasn't there. He can't believe he let this happen.
"What's it like, then?" he murmurs, hugging himself to stay standing. "Being dead."
Ranboo smiles at this, or Tubbo assumes he does - his mouth is creepily unseen on his face, but his eyes crinkle in a way that is so familiar. "It's good! Very good! I can float a little, and I can faze through things sometimes, and nothing can hurt me! Except rain. I think rain still hurts me." He wrinkles his nose at that. "Silly. Ghost logic. Did I tell you I saw Ghostbur, on the way out my limbo? Poor guy, he was crying and crying and crying."
Limbo. Limbo. "Ranboo, what do you mean, limbo?"
His husband's eyes widen again, and the air feels almost colder. "Oh! Well, Ranboo, as in my alive self, is in a limbo of his own. You know, like how Ghostbur and Wilbur were like. You can call me Boo, by the way, it's a very good pun, I think my alive self would have liked it. Tommy wants to call me Ghostboo, but I think that doesn't have the same ring to it. What do you think? Tubbo?"
Tubbo falls into a chair before the fire.
After a moment, the ghost sits beside him.
"Where's Michael?" he asks quietly.
"I don't know," Tubbo replies hopelessly.
The faded wisp of his husband turns his head. "You what?" he says, confused. "How can't you know where Michael is? He's our son."
Guilt swells in Tubbo's chest, so hard he can't breathe. "I don't know," he repeats, voice barely above a whisper. "I don't know how I lost either of you."
That morning, he'd been a father, a husband. How had this happened? Tubbo was the one on his last life. Tubbo was the one Ranboo had always told to keep safe. Tubbo was the one who needed to be cautious, for whom every respawn could be his last. Tubbo was always supposed to be the one to die.
Tubbo lost his brother Wilbur just over a year ago. He died to his own sword, stabbed in the stomach by his own father after detonating the country he'd created, they'd created, blowing it to smithereens. Most didn't mourn Wilbur, at least not where the public could see them. Good riddance, they'd said, good fucking riddance.
Tubbo lost his brother Tommy about seven or eight months ago. He hadn't been keeping track. Tommy died in prison after having been trapped there during an emergency lockdown, unable to escape, kept captive by his old abuser - Tubbo hates the word - and later murdered by him too. Dream beat him to death. He was sixteen when it happened.
Tubbo found his brother Tommy a couple weeks later, when he stumbled down the Prime Path with bloody clothes, eyes squinted against the sun, unsteady on his feet. Tubbo found someone who used to be his brother Wilbur in the middle of the rubble of Doomsday, surrounded by blue wool and chests and burnt down torches, a L'manberg flag draped over the wall behind him.
Ranboo had been in his life for a year now. Tubbo had finally started thinking that maybe he wouldn't lose him too.
Boo's hand reaches out for his face, cold and unnatural. He looks upset, confused. "I'm sorry."
He sits soundlessly on the floor cross legged before him, the fire crackling filling the room, before delivering the final blow. "At least you've still got me. And, personally, I think I'm better than the alive version of me."
This is what breaks Tubbo, and he curls in on himself with his head on his knees and sobs until his head spins with pain and his eyes burn and his nose runs down his face, and he mourns everything he's lost, and everything he can't get back.